Week #7: Launch Day!

Over that time, as you’ve seen, I’ve had tons of sleepless nights to get this thing perfect.

Now that it’s finally done, it’s been fun transitioning into the actual selling of it. Leading up to today, we were doing all sorts of things like the Dream 100, sending out packages and gifts, talking to our affiliates, doing Facebook Lives, and more to get everyone excited.

And it all came down to today. But first…

What Happened Earlier…

We’ve been taking all the pieces we’ve created over the last few months and putting them into one “Super Funnel.” If I’m completely honest, just a short week ago I was not happy with how everything was coming together.

Tuesday, I couldn’t fall asleep at night. The sales video we created had an amazing message but it wasn’t right for a sales video. The landing page looked okay but it wasn’t where it needed to be.

And because we kinda the funnel people, I needed to make sure our funnel was awesome. I knew everyone would be watching (and judging) us to see how well it looked and converted.

So Tuesday I went back to the drawing board. It would have been easier in a normal situation. But that week I had my Inner Circle event. That meant from 8 am to 7 pm I was in a room with 50 of the most amazing entrepreneurs on the earth, coaching them one by one on their business. So I didn’t have any time to work on the funnel, the videos, or anything.

It was on Tuesday that I decided everything was wrong. I messaged one of my old designers and asked him if he’d redesign the landing page for Expert Secrets. Then as I was watching the video we had, I realized it was more of a video ad as opposed to a video for a landing page. You can see the video here:

The video’s pretty cool, don’t you think?

But it’s more of ad than selling someone once they hit the landing page. So we needed a new video.

About that time, Dan Usher, who did that promo video, also did a video for one of our affiliates. That video also turned out amazing. Wanna see it? Here it is…

After watching Dan’s video he did for Rhonda, I realized that our messaging was wrong. I didn’t know what to do.

So I messaged Dan and Rhonda begging them to be able to use some of the script they used in their video for our launch video. Thankfully, they agreed.

The Final Push

The next day, while Inner Circle was going on, I slipped into my office during my 30 minute lunch break and rewrote the script. Then I messaged Brandon to come over to my house that night to re-record the sales video.

That night, after Inner Circle, I went home and got the camera set up. We recorded the voice over part of the script. Here’s a couple cool pictures from that night:

Then Brandon got the video edited and sent it back to Dan to do his magic with all the b-rolls.

Now I was able to sleep at night knowing that things were in motion. But I still couldn’t actually work on the funnel because I was busy with the Inner Circle.

Thursday, all the entrepreneurs went home which meant Friday I had a chance to create everything for the funnel. So I worked on the funnel Friday and Saturday.

On Monday we spent all day creating, crafting, connecting, and doing everything we needed to do to get this funnel perfect. We had so much fun, we were at the office until 3am (!). By that point, everything was blurry. We could barely keep our eyes open so we had to go to sleep.

So we all went home for a few hours to sleep and came back in the morning for the last push. From 9am to 2pm Steven and I locked down and tried to get everything done from the landing pages, the order forms, the follow up sequences, the action funnels, everything to make the funnel go live.

On top of that, Levi was transcribing videos for the sales copy on the page, Jake was designing graphics, and Brandon literally created 20 testimonial videos during that 48 hour period before the book launch.

Everything literally ended up on the funnel just minutes before we launched. In fact, I think we were six minutes late.

…and We’re Live!

Six minutes after 2 o’clock (MST) the funnel went live. When we pushed “go” we started seeing sales come in.

As we watched the sales start coming in like an avalanche, I realized I hadn’t even started promoting it yet. The sales were just from people who were waiting, excited because of all the pre-launch. Literally, every time we’d refresh the page we’d see another hundred sales… two hundred… three hundred book sales and beyond.

Everything was going good until we’d sold about a thousand copies…

We went back and looked at the stats. The book sales and conversion rates were good. But our upsell rates were not going as high we had hoped.

For a few minutes I got kinda frustrated trying to decide if we should re-design the whole funnel in the middle of the launch or if we should just let it ride for a little bit.

Luckily, we let it ride for about another 30 minutes. Then we looked and noticed something was wrong in our stats.

I had John and my team export all the numbers into a spreadsheet. We realized that we had forgotten to clear the stats after our testing we had done before the launch. This meant we had a whole bunch of test data in there which was throwing off our actual stats and average cart value.

From the dashboard our Average Cart Value was about $19 per sale. This was about half of what we needed to be successful.

After John went through the Excel sheet and looked at the actual numbers, we realized that our average cart value was literally $39.60 which was exactly where it needed to be for this to be a huge success.

We started cheering because we realized we had a winner on our hands.

A few minutes later I jumped onto a Facebook Live. Here’s that video if you want to watch it:

That was when the momentum really started picking up.

Our goal was to sell 10,000 copies the first week, 100,000 the first month, and 1 million the first year. But what’s cool is we didn’t get 10,000 sales in the first week. We almost got it in the very first day.

In fact, the book launched at 2 pm MST and 24 hours later we had sold 9,623 books. So today, we will pass 10,000 just a little over 24 hours after the book launch went live. Yay!

The Virtual Book Tour

Now, as the book launch is happening, today we started focusing on our virtual book tours. Traditional authors will go on a book tour where they’ll spend time going to Oprah, the Today Show, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, and all the different talk show hosts.

Unfortunately, as of right now, I don’t have the luxury to go on all those big talk show hosts so I’m doing a virtual book tour.

I found all the big social media influencers in our market and tangent markets. I’m doing Facebook Lives to each of their audiences.

So I woke up early this morning and we did Facebook Live #1 and crushed it. Facebook Live #2 worked awesome.

Then Facebook Live #3… and our entire internet goes down in the middle of the Facebook Live when we had hundreds of people streaming live.

We couldn’t get the internet back up. We called in the IT people but they couldn’t get it work either so we rebooted the servers.

When the internet finally came back on, we had to call that influencer and apologize profusely because we missed the time. But the next one was up. 3 minutes into it, the internet crashed again!

We realized there was no way we were going to get this done at the office. So we packed up everything, jumped in a car, drove back to my house. I plugged into my home internet and started the Facebook Lives from there.

From there we did four or five more Facebook Lives which were all amazing. A couple of them were really big. If you want to watch that one, check out this video here:

That was the interview Grant Cardone did with me. We had over 7700 people who watched that live and it helped sell hundreds and hundreds of books.

So now we are a little over 24 hours after the book launch. I’m a little tired and stressed out but super happy and excited that this message is going out to so many people.

I’ll keep you in the loop on what happens over the next seven days. Other than that, thank you so much for following us on this blog. If you got any value from this post, please share it on all your social media outlets and I’ll keep giving you behind-the-scenes details of what is happening day-by-day.

Who is Russell Brunson?

Over the past 10 years, Russell has built a following of over a million entrepreneurs, sold hundreds of thousands of copies of his books, popularized the concept of sales funnels, and co-founded a software company called ClickFunnels that helps tens of thousands of entrepreneurs quickly get their message out to the marketplace.